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If the best argument for Mir is that having the competition somehow improves Wayland (which is a dubious claim at best, void of any evidence), wouldn't it be even better if instead of Mir, all that effort would be put into... oh I don't know, maybe improving Wayland directly???

And just because one application has been ported to both Wayland and Mir doesn't mean that it's going to all be sunshine and cookies from thereon. There's still issues like games, proprietary software that gets ported from other platforms, esp. windows where the developers are used to one environment, one everything, no questions asked. Do you think everyone will go through the trouble of developing 2-3 different backends for their software? No, most likely they'll just use X because it's the lowest common denominator that runs on everything.

First of all I will just say that you dont have evidence for the opposite.

Second so you are saying that it would be better if we had one opensource media player, browser, office suite, distribution, de, display server except you approve otherwise in each case. I am sorry that's not open-source. Open source means forking. And of course NO ONE can stop you from creating or forking under gplv3. Don't like it. Don't use it. Don't port your app there. or port it and charge it. I can't see any problem there. Mir's problem.

Third in every project someone must take decisions. Why should Canonical and Wayland cooperate when there is clearly a direction problem between them. Mir is costing Canonical reputiation and money. Shuttleworth is not insane. Stop being haters and think more before judge anything. The easy solution was supporting Wayland. But was the best? I think Canonical is affraid to say public that Wayland is not viable for them. probably for technical reasons. I strongly believe that Ubuntu Touch wouldn't be in that state today with Wayland. Thats of course mine affair.

And last but not least to prove that forking is good i will let you compare today Gnome and Unity. Objectively Unity is more polished, modern, productive, feature rich and as Phoronix proved faster DE. Could Canonical do the same feature changes under Gnome? Of course not! You have an answer why Mir exist now.

Fantastic job. It seems that porting an application to Wayland AND Mir is not that hard. So there is no reason for community civil war in the end. It would be nice if they have a healthy competition like OpenOffice/LibreOffice have, that will push both projects to a better and better state. Already Wayland project seemS to have accelerated since Mir announced.

Consider opportunity to pull your head out of Canonical and Shuttlewroth propaganda shit(because it is) and think rationally for yourself. There is no such thing as "healthy competition" between opensource projects. There is only competition in reaching the set goal, between projects own "as-is" and "as-planned" that is, but the projects benefit ONLY if their goals do substantially differ. They are fighting with themselves in reaching the goal, not with others.

For example, Razor-Qt profited from KDE and was never seen as "competition". Now it joined with LXDE and it also was never seen as competition.
Hell, even BSD profited from Linux opensource driver development by porting. Nothing by rewriting or fighting over community. Competition between opensource projects is actually very harmful.

Which healthy competition profit do you mean by mentioning "OpenOffice/LibreOffice" ?? Any proof (except worthless taskbar ofc) ? OpenOffice must be burrowed and resources should be used within LibreOffice, or he should completely change its goals to start being profitable instead of damaging behavior.

For closed source projects, them being completely different world, yes, competition MAY bring improvements in theory, but in practice it brings half-finished projects, with very short support cycle, that are quickly made obsolete by next on-purpose incompatible versions, so that customers upgrade, as in "paying again". It drains money, reassures bad quality over timescale, as well as lots of versions. This is exactly why opensource development is better and is next evolution step. If you call this "healthy competition", no further questions for you.

Originally Posted by verde

First of all I will just say that you dont have evidence for the opposite.

Second so you are saying that it would be better if we had one opensource media player, browser, office suite, distribution, de, display server except you approve otherwise in each case. I am sorry that's not open-source. Open source means forking. And of course NO ONE can stop you from creating or forking under gplv3. Don't like it. Don't use it. Don't port your app there. or port it and charge it. I can't see any problem there. Mir's problem.

Third in every project someone must take decisions. Why should Canonical and Wayland cooperate when there is clearly a direction problem between them. Mir is costing Canonical reputiation and money. Shuttleworth is not insane. Stop being haters and think more before judge anything. The easy solution was supporting Wayland. But was the best? I think Canonical is affraid to say public that Wayland is not viable for them. probably for technical reasons. I strongly believe that Ubuntu Touch wouldn't be in that state today with Wayland. Thats of course mine affair.

And last but not least to prove that forking is good i will let you compare today Gnome and Unity. Objectively Unity is more polished, modern, productive, feature rich and as Phoronix proved faster DE. Could Canonical do the same feature changes under Gnome? Of course not! You have an answer why Mir exist now.

Oh, of course he has the evidence. You check the article and report back. Its called wasted resources.

Second, yes, we would be a LOT better if we had ONE player, browser etc - but UNIQUE in goals. Could be 100 players with own unique approaches. But not 2 display servers targeting same goal, or two Office Suits targeting same goals. Read above - WASTE. And to add spice, its not an end solution, its a display server, its to be built upon. Having several toolkits damages the development rate exactly the same (yes, I am talking about Qt vs GTK useless battle).

The best solution was to fork Wayland and mod it, then report any changes back. In case they are needed at all. That's how stuff is done.

Gnome is destroyed thanks to Miguel and co. They abadoned user wishes, they shut the doors, then Canonical had to do something, since they never ever support or package KDE properly for unknown reasons. So they have built their own Gnome and called it Unity. Ofc it WAS different from existing DEs, so it was not met with criticism of fragmentation (except from Gnome), but with criticism of instability (Canonical's unique constant "feature"). Unity is by far not "polished, modern, productive, feature rich (you gotta be kidding me right???)" - Unity is simple and consistent in looks on all possible platforms; and thats where it ends. I worked exclusively with Unity 3-4 months, at first it was very nice, but finally it became very very limited. I got bored. Installed KDE. What a breeze. Canonical thinks now same way with migration to Qt. But this will hardly ever make Unity "feature rich".

Hell, even BSD profited from Linux opensource driver development by porting. Nothing by rewriting or fighting over community. Competition between opensource projects is actually very harmful.

Which healthy competition profit do you mean by mentioning "OpenOffice/LibreOffice" ?? Any proof (except worthless taskbar ofc) ? OpenOffice must be burrowed and resources should be used within LibreOffice, or he should completely change its goals to start being profitable instead of damaging behavior.

Firstly, the BSD example isn't one that you should make in this comparison, there's a lot of competition between the BSD and Linux camps and some of the more colourful conflicts have been about drivers.
Secondly, there is a reason for AOO and LO, one is permissive and the other is copyleft.
In fact, in the end most of these conflicts boil down to licensing conflicts i.e. permissive vs copyleft.
It's hard to make both sides happy.

Firstly, the BSD example isn't one that you should make in this comparison, there's a lot of competition between the BSD and Linux camps and some of the more colourful conflicts have been about drivers.
Secondly, there is a reason for AOO and LO, one is permissive and the other is copyleft.
In fact, in the end most of these conflicts boil down to licensing conflicts i.e. permissive vs copyleft.
It's hard to make both sides happy.

Its own topic in itself, but BSD are free to port the ripe opensource stack and get some decent acceleration. Just to bash GPL or Linux more efficiently, that is. By the way, why permissive for office suit? Don't wake the StarOffice zombie (or any similar sub-kind).. Why would you plan to close-source the office suit?

Personally, I am over with it. BSD is for parts and interfaces - if there is need to connect to proprietary at all, GPL is for everything else. That's personal point and its not going anywhere soon. Works for me, if it doesn't for you, exercise your freedom.

Its own topic in itself, but BSD are free to port the ripe opensource stack and get some decent acceleration. Just to bash GPL or Linux more efficiently, that is. By the way, why permissive for office suit? Don't wake the StarOffice zombie (or any similar sub-kind).. Why would you plan to close-source the office suit?

Personally, I am over with it. BSD is for parts and interfaces - if there is need to connect to proprietary at all, GPL is for everything else. That's personal point and its not going anywhere soon. Works for me, if it doesn't for you, exercise your freedom.

Could you repeat what you said in a more coherent, understandable manner?
Because it looks as though you had a point to make, but you stopped short of making one.

First of all I will just say that you dont have evidence for the opposite.

So, you seriously want to guess Mir and Wayland's development is the one with the charge of proof?
Usually, an statistician (since this is nothing formal logic can solve) would assume status quo is the null hypothesis, just FYI.

Second so you are saying that it would be better if we had one opensource media player, browser, office suite, distribution, de, display server except you approve otherwise in each case. I am sorry that's not open-source. Open source means forking. And of course NO ONE can stop you from creating or forking under gplv3. Don't like it. Don't use it. Don't port your app there. or port it and charge it. I can't see any problem there. Mir's problem.

There are several things. First, the fragmentation of having several of any thing you named doesn't spread. You don't need to change the code you write because of several distros, browsers (this, kind of, you could actually use browser specific extensions), so they actually affect only themselves. The fragmentation of display servers and toolkits spread all over the place.
Second, nobody is stopping nobody, so that argument is out of place. Everybody is allowed to want them to stop, as long as they don't actually sabotage them.
Third, as it spreads, it affects other users. A given provider will either lose the option of talking directly to the window system or will have to choose which to support, if any, or port to both. Since we are acquiring relevancy for closed source providers just now, having two different display solutions will probably mean that they will perceive us as two different markets, or keep porting just to X. If the first happens, this means both markets will have ~50% the market share Linux have. And that's evidently less than they care about.

Third in every project someone must take decisions. Why should Canonical and Wayland cooperate when there is clearly a direction problem between them. Mir is costing Canonical reputiation and money. Shuttleworth is not insane. Stop being haters and think more before judge anything. The easy solution was supporting Wayland. But was the best? I think Canonical is affraid to say public that Wayland is not viable for them. probably for technical reasons. I strongly believe that Ubuntu Touch wouldn't be in that state today with Wayland. Thats of course mine affair.

Are you serious? They started spreading FUD, they made up technical problems Wayland doesn't have. As for being afraid of saying anything, just read god damned Shuttleworth's G+, and tell me he doesn't say almost constantly Wayland is crap. Please. Fear. ROFL. If they are not specific, it's because they have nothing.
Point out where is the "clear direction problem between them", please. Because Canonical folks couldn't point out any real issues on the technical side. If it's just politics, then don't blame the Wayland supporters that talk about politics. I, for one, care less about politics than results, as long as it's open source, and still see no difference in what Mir wants to do and what Wayland allows you to do.
Guess why does Mir cost Canonical reputation. Could that be that they gave zero tech arguments as of now that justify this break?
Or maybe pulling desktops on XMir to end users. It has "no benefits" written all over the place. Then, figure why it costs reputation. Not Wayland's fault.

And last but not least to prove that forking is good i will let you compare today Gnome and Unity. Objectively Unity is more polished, modern, productive, feature rich and as Phoronix proved faster DE. Could Canonical do the same feature changes under Gnome? Of course not! You have an answer why Mir exist now.

And also, a DE doesn't have the drawbacks of forking a crucial piece of software, and actually does things in a different way, but hey, let's ignore that facts.

Originally Posted by brosis

The best solution was to fork Wayland and mod it, then report any changes back. In case they are needed at all. That's how stuff is done.

The best solution was to first share their concerns, and then decide what to do being actually informed.

Originally Posted by intellivision

Firstly, the BSD example isn't one that you should make in this comparison, there's a lot of competition between the BSD and Linux camps and some of the more colourful conflicts have been about drivers.
Secondly, there is a reason for AOO and LO, one is permissive and the other is copyleft.
In fact, in the end most of these conflicts boil down to licensing conflicts i.e. permissive vs copyleft.
It's hard to make both sides happy.

So? He's pointing out that what benefits them both is not the competing part. And it is not. If they'd really compete, Linux camp would influence (since there is a bigger share of the X.org board composed by Linux stakeholders) mesa and such to start crippling BSD support consciously, and I don't mean in the ways that are actually sane improvements that hurt them because of their lagging support, but actual non-sense breaks.

So? He's pointing out that what benefits them both is not the competing part. And it is not. If they'd really compete, Linux camp would influence (since there is a bigger share of the X.org board composed by Linux stakeholders) mesa and such to start crippling BSD support consciously, and I don't mean in the ways that are actually sane improvements that hurt them because of their lagging support, but actual non-sense breaks.

Well, if you were looking at it from that perspective, then the Linux camp is already guilty of this through ALSA, SystemD and several GPL only drivers and components.
Don't get me wrong, a small part of the community loves to co-operate, but there's a large part that loves competition.

Well, if you were looking at it from that perspective, then the Linux camp is already guilty of this through ALSA, SystemD and several GPL only drivers and components.
Don't get me wrong, a small part of the community loves to co-operate, but there's a large part that loves competition.

I don't claim Linux is innocent, either.
Also, I'm mostly ignorant on which approaches those follow. If the change is actually needed, the approach is really different and the goal as well, then maybe it's not an unnecessary breakage. As for Mir and Wayland and the several toolkits (well, only most of them), the goals seem to be shared, and in the particular case of the display servers, there doesn't seem to be significant difference on the approach, aside from Mir being a server (while Wayland doesn't mandate it to be that way, but gives you the freedom to) and doing server side allocation (same clarification for Wayland as before). I understand the difference between GTK and Qt for being a licensing issue, and at the time GTK started Qt was proprietary even. I, too, see the reason for FLTK, since this does differ in approach, trying to prioritize lightweight, while the rest try to be feature complete (this doesn't mean they are willing to waste resources, but they will prioritize features over frugality).

As for the competition, being loved and being healthy are two different things. I agree most people on the community love to compete. This doesn't make it any healthier for the ecosystem. In situations it is (different approaches might fit different users), in situations it isn't. I don't call it competition when goals and approach doesn't overlap, and that's why I can generalize competition is not healthy on open source. But having multiple solutions, if the approach and golas are significantly different may be a good thing.

EDIT: I just realized I completely misread your post. My correct answer follows.
Maybe it's true. But ALSA, I believe (I'm not really that into subject, so I might be wrong) is there to solve lots of problems. On upstart/systemd, based on the fact I toyed a bit with their configs, make it far easier to make a concurrent startup, so again, is not a breakage "just because". What I meant on the other point was actually hostile breakages, aimed mostly to break compatibility with everyone else. I don't know which the licenses are or if they depend on very specific Linux features, though.
What I do know is that apps don't usually rely on init systems nor are they aware of them, so it doesn't really break compatibility, and just improving owns system doesn't imply competition, but just looking for new features. With ALSA, I have to admit in some cases they do, in other cases they just use OpenAL which in turn chooses an available backend. ALSA I'm aware is GPL, since it's inside the kernel, and is likely to depend on Linux specific features, since there must be a reason why "Linux" is included on its name.